JACKSON HOLE, WYO – Mark Byerly is headed to jail.
Ninth District Judge Tim Day yesterday sentenced Byerly to one year in the county jail. It was a compromise between what the defendant in a domestic battery case was hoping for and what the victim was seeking.
The 57-year-old local contractor was found guilty in July of aggravated assault, domestic battery, strangulation of a household member, and two counts of violating a protection order and intimidating a witness. After a weeklong trial, the jury returned the verdict after nine hours of deliberation. Byerly was acquitted of six other charges.
During the sentencing hearing, which ran more than five hours and spanned two days, friends and family from both sides offered testimony to both the defendant and victim’s character. Attorneys for the defendant argued for intensive supervised probation rather than prison time.
Byerly’s attorney, Elisabeth Trefonas, filed some 12 objections to the pre-sentencing investigation. She also appealed to the court to consider more than 40 emails and letters written on behalf of her client and referenced a packed courtroom Tuesday which she estimated to be three-fourths full of Byerly supporters.
“As I’ve said, this case has always seemed like an anomaly,” Trefonas argued, saying she could not make a connection between a family man with no history of domestic violence from a previous relationship and the man found guilty of a history of anger towards the victim.
As the defense paraded character witnesses before the judge one after another—including Byerly’s son, daughter, and ex-wife—Day at one point interrupted to call counsel to his bench. He reminded both attorneys that the defendant had already been convicted and the victim was not on trial. He asked witnesses for Byerly to stick to character references and reasons the defendant did not deserve to go to prison.
Byerly’s daughter pleaded to the judge to keep her father out of prison. She said incarceration for a first-time offense seemed like “very harsh punishment.”
Bylery’s ex-wife also testified that the defendant never raised a hand to her in 20 years of marriage.
After two hours of defense witnesses giving character references, Day suspended sentencing until the next day, when the victim and her side would be heard from.
On Wednesday morning, the woman who had been seeing Byerly off and on for the past six years gave her account of a drunk, a manipulator, and a violent and dangerous man.
On Wednesday, Judge Day spared the defendant time in the state penitentiary, opting instead to send Byerly to the county jail for one year with an additional seven years of intensive supervised probation with a suspended sentence.
Byerly was placed in custody following the sentencing and is now in maximum security in the Teton County Detention Center.
